Toward a Utilitarian Theory of Consumer Response to Advertising Music

Abstract

It is surprisingly difficult to know whether a piece of ad music will have its intended effect on consumers. A model developed by the author and a colleague (Craton & Lantos, 2011; Lantos & Craton, 2012) consists of four broad variables (listening situation, musical stimulus, listener characteristics, and listener’s advertising processing strategy) that interact to determine attitude toward the advertising music (Aam), a multidimensional construct that captures the many cognitive and affective elements of a consumer’s experience of ad music. Emerging research on negative emotional response to music, brand avoidance, and “mixed emotions” is consistent with predictions that Aam’s valence can be negative or a mixture of positive and negative (ambivalent). This literature also has implications for how to measure Aam and clarify its structure—specifically, the relationship between overall musical response and Aam’s many subsidiary elements. The present chapter reviews this emerging work, discusses its implications for the model, and suggests how the model can be extended by adding a layer of diverse psychological processes (“mechanisms”) that mediate between its four broad causal variables and Aam. The theory is “utilitarian” in the sense that the proposed mechanisms evolved to perform practical, biologically important tasks not specifically related to music processing.